Thinking About Women, by Mary Ellmann.

Harcourt, Brace & World, 240 pp., $4.95

"I was surprised at all the Cliffies who came up to me and commented on my article."

"Don't you think Cliffies read the Crimson?"

"Yes, but I thought it was too dry for them." --Crimson editor

PERHAPS it started when you were ten years old and you lost a fight with the kid up the block for the first time. You ran home bleeding and crying to your mother and she patched your wounds and told you, "You can't fight with boys, dear. They're stronger than you are." And she was right. Boys not only had strength you could never match, they had all the paraphernalia of strength: sweat socks, Erector sets, laundry bags full of shoulder pads, aircraft carrier models, framed photos of The Varsity, dirty books, baseball cards and pup tents, while you got the leftovers: paper dolls, hair curlers, bedmaking, frilly underwear, dishwashing, piano lessons, pajama parties. As you grew older, things got more confusing: boys went on fishing trips with their fathers, you were taken shopping by your mother; boys covered themselves with grease, you learned to pick out the right color hair ribbon; boys stayed out late at night, you babysat; if you were sent to a sexually segregated school, you found that yours had fewer labs and playing fields than theirs; boys could go alone to movies, parties, dances, baseball games, restaurants, any public assemblage, you had to go in groups or be escorted as a Date; and all this, which had nothing to do with strength, had no more comprehensible rationale than the last resort of harrassed parents (roughly equivalent to "because I said so," in turn equivalent to "history ordains it," signifying that the parents, helpess to transcend their role as evolutionary functionaries, are merely passing on the lessons of the collective past and present)--"because you're a girl." For the most unfortunate, there were parents like this one:

He loved his daughters very much...but they were girls and he sometimes felt that because they loved him, he could not make a serious mistake with them. If he did something wrong, they being women would grow up around the mistake and somehow convert it to knowledge. But his sons! He had the feeling that because they were men, their egos were more fragile--a serious error might hurt them forever.   --Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

It was rough, in a way. Only in a way, because you weren't really aware of it. You and everyone else around you were thoroughly immersed in the process; you were feeding on it; you could never quite pull yourself out and conceptualize what after all was bigger than you. Only when it was too late, when you were 16 or 17 or 18, when your mind was becoming aware of itself, did you begin to realize that men were faster runners, louder speakers, and more credible human beings, and that it was They ("They" being not so much men as the spokesmen of the general view), not you, who were proclaiming what you were.

MARY ELLMANN, a free-lance writer and critic married to the distinguished Joyce scholar Richard Ellmann, has written about the sexual analogies that permeate everyone's thinking, much to our tedium. Loosely constructed, confused, unfortunately titled, the book still manages to amuse as it meanders through various conceptions of femininity and their relationship to criticism and fiction.

Mrs. Ellmann's chief preoccupation is the way They impose sexual forms and opinions on the external world. Amidst multiple contradictions one principle stands firm: masculinity is good, femininity is bad. Beyond the usual visual analogies--curves and receptacles are womblike; steeples, shoes, and cylinders are phallic--lie physiological comparisons. They equate woman's mind with "her most definitive organ," according to Norman Mailer (one of Them), and just as the womb is conservative, nutritive, claustrophobic, feminine influence is antithetical to energy and thought. "Let's get out of here," a Harvard student said to a girl he visited in her dorm. "The smell of women paralyzes me."

Many of these analogies are based on wishful thinking, the author says:

An immobility is attributed to the entire female constitution by analogy with the supposed immobility of the ovum.... In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition,...an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15. The physiological contrast of apathy and enthusiasm might reasonably shift to one of individualism and conformity.

If women were making the contrasts.

Freud agreed that the psychoanalytic idea that there are feminine and masculine qualities in both men and women was painful for his listeners to acknowledge, Mrs. Ellmann argues. The pain is still with us, as an interview with Donovan in a recent issue of the New York Times shows:

"To be gentle is to be feminine," he quoted the general view.